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Grant helps Boys & Girls Clubs reach at-risk youth on the U.S. Gulf Coast

Orlando (left), 16, and Akilah, 14, play board games at a Boys and Girls Club in Gulfport, Miss. Orlando credits one of the club's anti-gang programs, supported by Church World Service, with helping him avoid gang life. Photo: Matthew Hackworth/CWS

October 16, 2007

By Matt Hackworth/CWS

GULFPORT, MS – When Hurricane Katrina sent seawater flooding through his lower income neighborhood, 16-year-old Orlando was poised to choose between a hopeful future and a street gang recruiting new members.

"They were trying to get me to wear their colors and stuff," Orlando says in a voice barely above a whisper. "But here, here they help me avoid the gangs."

Here, in the case of the children in Gulfport's Forest Heights neighborhood, is the Boys & Girls Club of the Gulf Coast. Part of a $1.35 million grant from Church World Service disaster response partner Diakonie Emergency Aid (Germany) allowed the Club's programs to continue even though a massive wave turned three Club buildings into piles of rubble.

Like many kids, 14 year-old Akilah spent a good bit of her after-school time at the Boys & Girls Club. She could walk there from her home in Forest Heights, and she remembers seeing the heap of brick and wood that was the club after the storm.

"I cried," she said. "We didn't have nowhere [sic] to go. We didn't have any money. I felt like my life was over."

Community dependency on the Clubs pushed administrators to meet one week after the storm.

"We had to decide if we were going to fold or if we were going to rebuild," said Sam Burke, executive director of Boys & Girls Clubs of the Gulf Coast. "It was unanimous, and that's when we said 'let's get going.'"

The Club worked to secure temporary facilities in area school buildings while changing its services to best serve families coping with the storm’s damage. Staff worked with area teachers to find ways to tutor children who had missed several months of school. The Clubs also started to provide morning and afternoon care for students, so parents could return to work and begin putting their lives back together.

"We really tried to keep the kids with us (each day) as long as we could," Burke said. "In many cases, they had nothing to go home to."

If not them, who?

Before Hurricane Katrina, the Club attracted nearly 200 kids a day who could find help with homework, sports programs, and life skills at four facilities in the Gulfport and Biloxi area. Hurricane Katrina scattered Gulfport's children across the country, so that now the Club serves about half as many children as it did before Aug. 29, 2005.

Children in lower-income communities along the U.S. Gulf Coast were more susceptible to engage in risky sexual practices, drug use or gang activities before the storm. Well-documented research suggests the children who endure Hurricane Katrina's continuing trauma are now even more likely to take on self-destructive tendencies, which is why CWS chose the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Gulf Coast to receive funding for youth-at-risk programs.

"We knew these youth were vulnerable before the storm and Hurricane Katrina made it worse," said CWS Associate Director for Emergency Response Linda Reed-Brown. "These clubs had a good record of engaging kids in their neighborhoods, so if they didn’t do it, who would?"

Empowerment

Akilah and Orlando are involved in the Club's SMART (Skills, Mastery and resistance Training) Moves program, which empowers children to combat drugs, alcohol, violence, and childhood sex.

The same program engages students in nearby East Biloxi, where the community lost its Boys & Girls Club building to the storm. In a temporary Club set up in a modern school building, 12-year-olds Tiffany and Kiana show off T-shirts they created for a sexual abstinence rally. Their friend Jerrod rattles off facts he’s learned at the center.

"You only live 25 years when you have AIDS," Jerrod said. "We learn about why it's not good to have sex at a young age, or doing drugs or why you don’t drink and drive."

A fifth grader caught in a race to find the right answer in a math game. Kids in many Gulf Coast communities are behind in school because of Hurricane Katrina, and the Boys and Girls Clubs are working to help them catch up.

Photo: Matthew Hackworth/CWS

It's a school holiday but at the Club, a boisterous room full of fifth graders is in a heated, boys-versus-girls math quiz battle. Next door, a line begins to form of students anxious to use the computer lab.

The lure of games, sports, and fun draws students into the building but it is the programs promoting academics and abstinence from violence, gangs and drug use that empower students to live in amongst the angst and stress of a community in recovery.

"We really don't know what our kids are going home to," Burke said. "So if mom or dad are having a hard time, we can at least try to equip these kids to cope."

Kids at the East Biloxi club are able to focus their anger and frustration in a newly-formed drum line, for example. Kids have also been encouraged to detail their storm experiences in art and music.

Above all, that the clubs are open brings a sense of normalcy in the lives of children whose worlds have been turned upside down. They are providing a respite from Hurricane Katrina, all the while empowering kids to handle the stresses of recovery.

"I know people here," Jerrod of the East Biloxi Boys & Girls Club said. "We're all a happy family. This is where I come to not do drugs."

Media Contact:
Lesley Crosson, CWS/New York, 212-870-2676;
Jan Dragin, 781-925-1526;

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